Velobuild VB-R-368 Aeroframe

[mchaggis]

I would not expect it to be comfortable, and the stack is very low. I would run the widest tyres the frame can take as a starting point, and I think the bike can be fast IF you fit on it. That's a huge if. The geometry is extremely aggressive and doesn't fit most.
The worst bike you can buy is a harsh frame that doesn't even fit you.
I say this as someone who bought harsh frames that didn't fit me ..

As pistonbroke already said and perhaps counterintuitively, it's not a harsh ride at all.  Subjectively, more dampening than the TCR I migrated from.  If anything my concern is that it's slow because it's dampening too much, but I need a lot more miles, preferably not in Winter and also some experimentation with tyre pressures, to confirm.

It's also very comfortable *for me* but you're quite right it may not fit most or even many.

[Pistonbroke]

W1. Just the one large thick c ring at the top to allow the cables past, and think there are some thin c shims included to make sure the top cap clears the frame.

Mchaggis... Feel the same way. Comfortable and well damped. Going to try putting my 1000g wheels on it to see what difference it makes. They are only 30 odd mm deep compared to the 65's so weight Vs potential aero gains.

Regards geometry/fit.... I am certainly no expert, but currently ride the 368 (set up long with steepest seat angle and 160mm cranks) and an FL1 (which I guess is pretty standard road geometry, 170mm cranks), and while they feel and ride differently the comfort, confidence and handling are all good. Just different.
Would absolutely encourage people to take the brave pill and try something new.

[Dareios]

Hey finally assembled everything. The brake mounts maybe need some more facing and maybe in the future a 3mm offset chainring is needed for the right crankshaft assembly (a lot of spacers now and chainring is mounted on the wrong side of the powermeter.

Sweet, how much does it weight fully built?

[toxin]

That and the moderate reach should make it particularly well suited as an hybrid TT bike with clip-ons, no?

Would also be interesting to hear if there are any other budget chinese road bike frames you’d recommend looking at if aerodynamics is a priority.

Should be.

honestly, nothing standout really comes to mind

[mtm]

That and the moderate reach should make it particularly well suited as an hybrid TT bike with clip-ons, no?

Would also be interesting to hear if there are any other budget chinese road bike frames you’d recommend looking at if aerodynamics is a priority.

Not toxin, but I would say the TanTan TT-X65 and TT-X67 both look decent (I would personally think slightly less aero than VB368, but most likely lighter). I also saw a new one from Mcelo on AliExpress that looks interesting:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005011603478146.html

All of these have more old school/traditional geometry, though, and all seem to have seat posts with setback so you can't get the saddle as far forward.

[Joda55]

Not toxin, but I would say the TanTan TT-X65 and TT-X67 both look decent (I would personally think slightly less aero than VB368, but most likely lighter). I also saw a new one from Mcelo on AliExpress that looks interesting:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005011603478146.html

All of these have more old school/traditional geometry, though, and all seem to have seat posts with setback so you can't get the saddle as far forward.

Yeah I was checking them out too. But so many have complained on build quality on TanTans so not sure. Also the price is so low that it makes me suspicious lol.

[mchaggis]

Regards geometry/fit.... I am certainly no expert, but currently ride the 368 (set up long with steepest seat angle and 160mm cranks)

Bike Geometry friend!

[giorgiobuccio]

I wanted to share my riding impressions.
Overall, I’m very happy with the bike — both in terms of my position on the saddle and the sensations it gives while riding.
It’s stiff but not uncomfortable.
Maybe it feels just slightly less punchy during low-speed accelerations or in the first few seconds, but once it gets up to speed you really feel how reactive and fast it is.

Last week I did a 10-minute test at 345 watts average and managed to hold a little over 43 km/h with stable wind conditions and a temperature of 10°C.
During that test I also tried to stay in the lowest position possible. I consider myself fairly aerodynamic, but at 186 cm and 85 kg I still catch some wind.
I was also running what are probably the fastest tires in the world — Vittoria Corsa Pro Speed TLR — but unfortunately two days later in a race, after hitting a fairly hard pothole, the sidewall cracked and my race was over  I knew they were delicate and that I’d probably puncture sooner or later, but I didn’t expect them to fail so easily.

Overall, the speed test was very good.

[Joda55]

Nobody can really tell you which of these bikes will be faster from pictures, but you can look at some individual features and judge those. Really the VB doesn't make any disastrous mistakes. The fork crown and lower headtube are a bit odd. The head tube trailing edge is a bit narrow, so that might be a bit unstable at high yaw, the flat transition from top of bb to seat tube isn't the best, but with the mess that the airflow is in that area, it's probably irrelevant. The seat tube and post are a bit wide. The leading edge on the lower section of the fork is flat. The head tube is very narrow, so that's its biggest positive. Can't really say how fast it is when it's all put together.

The advantage big brands have is that they already have libraries of the optimised tube shapes and lots of time and money to spend on optimising every tiny detail (a real pain in the ass). Velobuild really can't afford to do that so they just throw deep tube shapes at the problem, but that's not really as good.

I'd lean towards the S5 simply because of the gap in resources and it tests well (though my suspicion is that the wind tunnel is more flattering to it than the real world), but I wouldn't expect the VB to be a parachute either.

I asked Hambini how aero it might be as well and he replied this:

” I'd say it was not far off a carbonspeed or winspace T1600.

The key thing to do here is to make sure you get a decent set of bars and wheels, otherwise the frame aero will make little difference.”

[Mühi]

Hi all,
after following this thread since a few months, I guess it's time for my first post:
Having owned a Workswell WCB-062 MTB for 10 years now, and building a LC LCR-017D last year, I decided now's time for a chinese aero bike. Shopping around a bit there doesn't seem to be a lot of choice in the budget category (<700€), except for the VBR-368, or some TanTan models.
As the TanTan quality is known to be a bit hit-and-miss, I decided to go for the 368, mostly based on looks, as there really is no rational reason to buy this bike because it is just so damn heavy and not aero tested. But I want a bike I take a look at and think it's sick over the fastest possible bike that looks like any other, so I still went ahead.
Below are a few of the experiences and problems I hade while ordering and building the bike:

Order and Delivery
I Ordered the frame on 23.01.2026, with some Serenade 60mm deep wheels to go along. Communication before the order was good, although it was not as perfect as with LightCarbon last year. Ordering a custom design was no problem at all, with just two questions back about specifics and a confirmation that they can do it.
After ordering, the painting process took 14 days before shipping (with the frame currently being in stock).
The carrier they used for shipping was quick, but had some weird tracking that didn't update for some time. On 20.2.2026 (28 days later), the frame arrived in a big cardboard box with a large tear on the side [box_tear.jpg]. Luckily everything inside was very well packaged and completely fine.

Building experience
Building this bike was not an easy task, as there is definitely a lot to go/do wrong for less experienced mechanics or people with a limited toolset. Heres a list of things you have to watch out for when building up this frame (or at least my sample):

Paint quality
The paintjob on this frame only costs 70$ for 4 different colors, which is reflected in the quality: There's paint overspray on basically any surface that shouldn't have paint on it.
- The headset area on the top and bottom had some paint on it, but nothing that couldn't be fixed by careful swinging of a sharp blade [headset_overspray.jpg].
- The rim of the T47 bottom bracket has a noticable paint lip around it. This doesn't interfere with the installed BB, but if not removed you may chip your paint with the installation tool [bb_overspray.jpg].
- The rear brake mounts had extreme amounts of overspray on them and need to be faced before mounting anything to them [rear_brake_overspray.jpg]. The paint on the top also just chips off when you touch it on an edge.
- The rear dropouts are also extremely bad, most of the paint in there has already flaked off, even though I had freshly unwrapped the frame at the time of taking the image [dropout_paint.jpg].
- The paint overall seems to be extremely soft, as it already contains a lot of small scratches and swirls, even directly after unpacking the frame.
- The paint is visibly scratched next to some holes in the frame and handlebar that have been opened up by some rotary tool.
- Worst of all: My design included a little german flag, but they messed up the order of the colors and I now have a Belgian bike  :'(


Small parts
The quality of accessories to the frame seems to be much worse than that of my LightCarbon, or even my old Workswell frame. With those, all the cable guides (outlets(?)) were fitting securely in the frame and didn't rattle. Unfortunately with this frame the DI2 outlet below the front detailleur mount was very loose and couldn't be tightened enough to stop rattling, as the frame just wasn't thick enought at that point to be clamped by the mechanism. I had to fix this problem by putting a few layers of ducttape on the inside part of the clamp, to slightly shim the two halves apart [cable_outlet.jpg].

The supplied spacers and headset cover are also a bit disappointing. The headset cover is not injection moulded like the rest of the parts, but 3D printed. On it's own this isn't too bad, but then having it sanded slightly gives it some grey color that doesn't fit the spacers. I will 3D print my own cover and spacers here to match their colors.

The spacers are also the most annoying ones I have ever installed, as they fall apart from what seems like air movement as long as they are not squeezed yet.
The hole in the bottom of the handlebars to register their angle to the spacers was also much too small on one side of my pair, and had to be opened up with a little knife to be able to fit the spacer in there. Unfortunately it's very hard to see this on camera [handlebar_hole.jpg].
Also definitely ask for some extra spacers with your order, as mine came with 2.5cm of spacers, which should barely be enough for many riders on such a relatively aggressive frame (1cm is the minimum you need use with the default headset cover).

Threaded stuff
BB
Overall, it seems Velobuild doesn't really know what they're doing with regards to anything threaded. The T47 BB threads are extremely rough, to the point it easily shows up on my phone camera [bb_threads.jpg], and also seem to be super dirty for some reason. Unfortunately I don't have a 47mm big thread cutter, so it will have to stay that way. Even if I had one it wouldn't be of much use, as the threads are so exceptionally loose, the BB has a lot of wiggle even when screwed all the way in, but not yet touching the shell's outer surface.
I'm also certain that either the threads on both sides are angularly misaligned, or the flanges of the shell are misaligned, as the side of the thread insert peeks out of the carbon shell at the back of one side, but not on the front [bb_threads.jpg]. On the other side, the insert doesn't show at all.

Overall the bottom bracket shell quality of the frame seems to be super bad, the worst of any chinese frame I own. The threads on the left side were so bad, I tried to find the start of the threads for 2 minutes before finally being able to thread the BB in.

Fork
Another important threaded part of the frame, and equally bad to the BB were the front brake mounts. For some reason those were so full of stuff (paint overspray? carbon dust from manufacturing? idk) I couldn't thread the screws in more that 2 or 3 mm on both mounts. Sure, recutting those M5 threads is a relatively easy task, but not something I expect to have to do to build my bike... [fork_threads.jpg] (Pictures from here in second post)


General confusion
Maybe I havent built enough modern bikes yet to know if some of those are some agreed to standards, but I was also very confused by the lack of any hints on how things go together. The frame includes two different headset bearings, one 7mm and one 8mm tall, but makes no mention which goes where [headset_bearings.jpg]. For future reference: The thicker headset bearing goes on top. Mine had a red seal Not a huge problem to have, but as it would be so easy to mitigate by including a single sheet of paper with the frame, I'm still marking it up.

There also is some small aluminium part included, the purpose of which seems unclear to me [weird_pard.jpg]. Going by the hole spacing it fits on the bottom of the downtube right before the BB area, but why should one put it there and what does it do? Pls help

Somehow, not only me but also VeloBuild themselves seem to be a bit confused on which parts are needed to build up the frame, as my fork already had the camfer to fit the bottom headset bearing molded in, but the accessories bag still included the little ring to put on the fork [fork_ring.jpg]. I'm not sure why that is included if it isn't needed, as it lead to a bit of confusion on my side when building the bike.

Seatpost
Having read the troubles on the earlier pages of getting the seatpost not to slip, I preemptively greased the bolt and sliding surfaces of the clamping mechanism, and put carbon paste on the seatpost. This seems to work very nicely, as I haven't noticed any slipping yet (although I only tried to get it to slip indoors, as I'm waiting for the nice weather next week before taking it outside). My seatpost also fits pretty snugly in the frame, without any of the problems previous posters had. The inside of the frame looks a bit rough/unfinished where the clamp goes in, but it didn't hinder anything from going together.

When cutting the seatpost to length however I had a pretty alarming issue. Finishing the bottom of the  cut, a 5mm wide section of fibers just delaminated from the seatpost, and started pulling away from the rest [seatpost_delamination.jpg]. Pulling it away further was also very easy. It felt like I could unwrap the whole seatpost if I kept going, so I broke the fibers by kinking them the other way.
Having worked with carbon a for a while, this is not anything I expect from anything well adhered. Normally you should pull your muscles trying to get a millimeter of that stuff to come from the rest, so It seems to me that my post is somehow faulty. Looking at it from the bottom, I couldn't see any signs of weak compression or voids so I'm not sure what happened there.

Overall this doesn't really inspire confidence in the rest of the frame, but as I seem to be an idiot I'll still go ahead and ride it to find out.

Weights
Frame (Size 49): 1464g
Fork (uncut): 526g
Handlebars (38x100): 375g
Seatpost (uncut): 342g

Conclusion
Overall I am disappointed with the quality of this frame, especially compared to my LCR-017D which was the same price (admittedly without a complex paintjob). The strucutural quality of the frame seems fine to me for now, but there's just a hoarde of little things wrong with the frame that need to be fixed before building it.
Had I known all of these things before I maybe would not have bought the frame, although I'm still a sucker for the looks of it, so who knows.
I still built the bike up after fixing all the problems, and can confirm the new SRAM Force E1 rear derailleur does not hit the inside of the frame anymore.

[Mühi]

Here is the rest of the pictures

[Pistonbroke]

Certainly seems like a mixed bag on the QC front 

[w1ll337]

Hi all,
after following this thread since a few months, I guess it's time for my first post:
Having owned a Workswell WCB-062 MTB for 10 years now, and building a LC LCR-017D last year, I decided now's time for a chinese aero bike. Shopping around a bit there doesn't seem to be a lot of choice in the budget category (<700€), except for the VBR-368, or some TanTan models.
As the TanTan quality is known to be a bit hit-and-miss, I decided to go for the 368, mostly based on looks, as there really is no rational reason to buy this bike because it is just so damn heavy and not aero tested. But I want a bike I take a look at and think it's sick over the fastest possible bike that looks like any other, so I still went ahead.
Below are a few of the experiences and problems I hade while ordering and building the bike:

Order and Delivery
I Ordered the frame on 23.01.2026, with some Serenade 60mm deep wheels to go along. Communication before the order was good, although it was not as perfect as with LightCarbon last year. Ordering a custom design was no problem at all, with just two questions back about specifics and a confirmation that they can do it.
After ordering, the painting process took 14 days before shipping (with the frame currently being in stock).
The carrier they used for shipping was quick, but had some weird tracking that didn't update for some time. On 20.2.2026 (28 days later), the frame arrived in a big cardboard box with a large tear on the side [box_tear.jpg]. Luckily everything inside was very well packaged and completely fine.

Building experience
Building this bike was not an easy task, as there is definitely a lot to go/do wrong for less experienced mechanics or people with a limited toolset. Heres a list of things you have to watch out for when building up this frame (or at least my sample):

Paint quality
The paintjob on this frame only costs 70$ for 4 different colors, which is reflected in the quality: There's paint overspray on basically any surface that shouldn't have paint on it.
- The headset area on the top and bottom had some paint on it, but nothing that couldn't be fixed by careful swinging of a sharp blade [headset_overspray.jpg].
- The rim of the T47 bottom bracket has a noticable paint lip around it. This doesn't interfere with the installed BB, but if not removed you may chip your paint with the installation tool [bb_overspray.jpg].
- The rear brake mounts had extreme amounts of overspray on them and need to be faced before mounting anything to them [rear_brake_overspray.jpg]. The paint on the top also just chips off when you touch it on an edge.
- The rear dropouts are also extremely bad, most of the paint in there has already flaked off, even though I had freshly unwrapped the frame at the time of taking the image [dropout_paint.jpg].
- The paint overall seems to be extremely soft, as it already contains a lot of small scratches and swirls, even directly after unpacking the frame.
- The paint is visibly scratched next to some holes in the frame and handlebar that have been opened up by some rotary tool.
- Worst of all: My design included a little german flag, but they messed up the order of the colors and I now have a Belgian bike  :'(


Small parts
The quality of accessories to the frame seems to be much worse than that of my LightCarbon, or even my old Workswell frame. With those, all the cable guides (outlets(?)) were fitting securely in the frame and didn't rattle. Unfortunately with this frame the DI2 outlet below the front detailleur mount was very loose and couldn't be tightened enough to stop rattling, as the frame just wasn't thick enought at that point to be clamped by the mechanism. I had to fix this problem by putting a few layers of ducttape on the inside part of the clamp, to slightly shim the two halves apart [cable_outlet.jpg].

The supplied spacers and headset cover are also a bit disappointing. The headset cover is not injection moulded like the rest of the parts, but 3D printed. On it's own this isn't too bad, but then having it sanded slightly gives it some grey color that doesn't fit the spacers. I will 3D print my own cover and spacers here to match their colors.

The spacers are also the most annoying ones I have ever installed, as they fall apart from what seems like air movement as long as they are not squeezed yet.
The hole in the bottom of the handlebars to register their angle to the spacers was also much too small on one side of my pair, and had to be opened up with a little knife to be able to fit the spacer in there. Unfortunately it's very hard to see this on camera [handlebar_hole.jpg].
Also definitely ask for some extra spacers with your order, as mine came with 2.5cm of spacers, which should barely be enough for many riders on such a relatively aggressive frame (1cm is the minimum you need use with the default headset cover).

Threaded stuff
BB
Overall, it seems Velobuild doesn't really know what they're doing with regards to anything threaded. The T47 BB threads are extremely rough, to the point it easily shows up on my phone camera [bb_threads.jpg], and also seem to be super dirty for some reason. Unfortunately I don't have a 47mm big thread cutter, so it will have to stay that way. Even if I had one it wouldn't be of much use, as the threads are so exceptionally loose, the BB has a lot of wiggle even when screwed all the way in, but not yet touching the shell's outer surface.
I'm also certain that either the threads on both sides are angularly misaligned, or the flanges of the shell are misaligned, as the side of the thread insert peeks out of the carbon shell at the back of one side, but not on the front [bb_threads.jpg]. On the other side, the insert doesn't show at all.

Overall the bottom bracket shell quality of the frame seems to be super bad, the worst of any chinese frame I own. The threads on the left side were so bad, I tried to find the start of the threads for 2 minutes before finally being able to thread the BB in.

Fork
Another important threaded part of the frame, and equally bad to the BB were the front brake mounts. For some reason those were so full of stuff (paint overspray? carbon dust from manufacturing? idk) I couldn't thread the screws in more that 2 or 3 mm on both mounts. Sure, recutting those M5 threads is a relatively easy task, but not something I expect to have to do to build my bike... [fork_threads.jpg] (Pictures from here in second post)


General confusion
Maybe I havent built enough modern bikes yet to know if some of those are some agreed to standards, but I was also very confused by the lack of any hints on how things go together. The frame includes two different headset bearings, one 7mm and one 8mm tall, but makes no mention which goes where [headset_bearings.jpg]. For future reference: The thicker headset bearing goes on top. Mine had a red seal Not a huge problem to have, but as it would be so easy to mitigate by including a single sheet of paper with the frame, I'm still marking it up.

There also is some small aluminium part included, the purpose of which seems unclear to me [weird_pard.jpg]. Going by the hole spacing it fits on the bottom of the downtube right before the BB area, but why should one put it there and what does it do? Pls help

Somehow, not only me but also VeloBuild themselves seem to be a bit confused on which parts are needed to build up the frame, as my fork already had the camfer to fit the bottom headset bearing molded in, but the accessories bag still included the little ring to put on the fork [fork_ring.jpg]. I'm not sure why that is included if it isn't needed, as it lead to a bit of confusion on my side when building the bike.

Seatpost
Having read the troubles on the earlier pages of getting the seatpost not to slip, I preemptively greased the bolt and sliding surfaces of the clamping mechanism, and put carbon paste on the seatpost. This seems to work very nicely, as I haven't noticed any slipping yet (although I only tried to get it to slip indoors, as I'm waiting for the nice weather next week before taking it outside). My seatpost also fits pretty snugly in the frame, without any of the problems previous posters had. The inside of the frame looks a bit rough/unfinished where the clamp goes in, but it didn't hinder anything from going together.

When cutting the seatpost to length however I had a pretty alarming issue. Finishing the bottom of the  cut, a 5mm wide section of fibers just delaminated from the seatpost, and started pulling away from the rest [seatpost_delamination.jpg]. Pulling it away further was also very easy. It felt like I could unwrap the whole seatpost if I kept going, so I broke the fibers by kinking them the other way.
Having worked with carbon a for a while, this is not anything I expect from anything well adhered. Normally you should pull your muscles trying to get a millimeter of that stuff to come from the rest, so It seems to me that my post is somehow faulty. Looking at it from the bottom, I couldn't see any signs of weak compression or voids so I'm not sure what happened there.

Overall this doesn't really inspire confidence in the rest of the frame, but as I seem to be an idiot I'll still go ahead and ride it to find out.

Weights
Frame (Size 49): 1464g
Fork (uncut): 526g
Handlebars (38x100): 375g
Seatpost (uncut): 342g

Conclusion
Overall I am disappointed with the quality of this frame, especially compared to my LCR-017D which was the same price (admittedly without a complex paintjob). The strucutural quality of the frame seems fine to me for now, but there's just a hoarde of little things wrong with the frame that need to be fixed before building it.
Had I known all of these things before I maybe would not have bought the frame, although I'm still a sucker for the looks of it, so who knows.
I still built the bike up after fixing all the problems, and can confirm the new SRAM Force E1 rear derailleur does not hit the inside of the frame anymore.

I also finished assembling mine this week, and it wasn't an easy task, mainly because there are no instructions on where the parts go. I'm still not sure if the head tube is assembled correctly, because there is backlash, as shown in the attached video, and I don't think that's normal. Has anyone else had this problem
?

So far, what I understand about assembling the headset is that only the black bearing goes in the bottom part, without the fork ring, and the red bearing and C ring go on top, followed by the spacers. Is this really correct, guys?

[bastianb]

Assembly is correct yes. Have you tightened the top cap enough to elaminate the play? Or is the fork still too long and you don’t get bearing compression at all? Or you tightened the stem onto the fork before you tightened down the top cap?

Order: assembly everything, every bolt is loose
Tighten Compression plug, then tighten the top cap. Only then the stem or handlebar.

[Mühi]

I had a similar problem when building the bike. Check the distance between your expander plug and the top cap. The top cap is very thick and easily collides with the expander preventing you from tightening the headset.